Category: publishing

“From Fiji to Florida to Fresno, Calif., Andrew Carnegie built 2,509 libraries between 1881 and 1917, mostly in America, the British Isles and Canada. To this day, Carnegie’s free-to-the-people libraries remain Pittsburgh’s most significant cultural export, a gift that has shaped the minds and lives of millions.”

Penguin Classics is “freshening its lineup. That means some authors get new attention while others get dropped. “Just as editors pretend to second-guess the market (whilst in fact trying to repeat their rivals’ success), so Penguin Classics has been led by the nose towards the current milch-cow of Victorian genre fiction. Readers brought up on the pastiche melodramas of Sarah Waters, Peter Ackroyd, Peter Carey, Charles Palliser, et al, are hungry for the real thing. Hence the popularity of Wilkie Collins, whose 1860s sensation novels were massive in their own time, but sank without trace during the 100 years after his death.”

Daniel Menaker is Random House’s new editor-in-chief. He’s a “literary insider who left Random House to edit books at rival HarperCollins in 2001, has been reaching out to authors and expressing confidence he can halt an exodus of writers to Penguin Group USA.” Prominent RH writers have been leaving the imprint since Anne Godoff was fired last month.

Menaker spent “26 years at The New Yorker, beginning as a fact-checker and concluding as a senior editor, mainly in its fiction department. His years in the magazine’s singularly influential fiction department give him outsize literary credentials, and as a book editor he is best known for his eye for sophisticated fiction.”

” ‘Atonement,’ Ian McEwan’s unlikely best seller about the meaning of fiction, was among the winners Wednesday night of a National Book Critics Circle prize. In the general nonfiction category, which included William Langewiesche’s controversial ‘American Ground,’ Samantha Power won for ‘A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide’.”

So you’re a book editor and it’s your job to read books. But there are so many of them. So you go through maybe ten a week – a good 400+ in a year… “So how do professional readers get through the required reading for their ‘plum’ jobs? It is a given that most people in the industry have to read (manuscripts) outside of work hours, in their own time. There’s too much going on otherwise.”

“The billion-dollar music genre, which already has the advertising and fashion businesses bouncing to its beat, has now infiltrated one of pop culture’s less-frequented markets — book publishing. Ranging from pricey coffee-table eye candy to practical reference and history books, the tomes are an effort to preserve hip-hop culture in more than just CDs and music videos.”

A year after shutting down her popular TV book club, Oprah is starting a new book club – this time for classic books. “Winfrey plans to make a classic selection three to five times a year, in shows originating from a site connected with the book or the author.”

Scotland’s Canongate press hit the big time last year when Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi took the Booker Prize. Last night Canongate’s ascendency to the major league was “confirmed in spectacular fashion as Canongate won Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards.”